The archive has a great many placards about women's safety. They are about streets, hours, police, law, the walk home. They argue, reasonably enough, that a woman should be able to move through a city without calculating the risk of it.
Then a set of ten photographs arrives from Goa, taken after dark, and the argument has moved.
On brown cardboard, held straight up over the head with a light behind it: MY GAMLA. MY PHOOL. MY BODY. MY RULE.
A gamla is a flowerpot and a phool is a flower. The second half of the line is a slogan everybody has read on a tote bag. The first half is not; it is something the maker has put in front of it. Our reading, which is a reading rather than a fact about the maker's intention, is that the flower and the pot it grows in are the oldest furniture in the Indian vocabulary for a woman's body, the terms of the wedding speech and the film song, where she is the thing that blooms and is given away. Put my in front of each of them, four times, and the whole inherited set of metaphors changes owner.
What is striking is that this is not a demand for protection. It is a statement about title.
The one that makes the point hardest is addressed like a letter. DEAR ABUSERS, it begins, ruled neatly inside a dotted pink border, in the format of a school exercise. And then: FUCK YOU FOR RUINING SEX & PLEASURE FOR OUR BODIES.
Read the accusation carefully, because it is not the usual one. It does not say for making us unsafe. It says for ruining sex and pleasure . It names, as the thing that was damaged, a good that most public argument about sexual violence never gets round to mentioning at all. Safety is the floor. This placard is angry about the ceiling.
OWING YOUR Entire Existence to a VAGINA & Still THREATENED BY WOMEN
That one is written in big uneven capitals on white card, and the writer has run out of room near the end. The D of THREATENED is squeezed in at half size, riding on top of the B of BY. It is the kind of mistake that only happens when somebody is writing the sentence out for the first time, standing up, on the way somewhere.
The same preoccupation turns up a third time, in orange handwriting on a sheet held up to cover the writer's mouth: We live in a world that teaches women to hide a drop of natural blood, yet allows the violence of abusers to be swept under the… . The last word is behind a hand, and it is going to be rug.
Three placards carry three different bodily facts, which are desire, anatomy and menstruation, and the same move is in each of them: taking something treated as unmentionable and putting it on a two-foot sheet of paper in a public street. The shame is the subject.
Not all of the night is in that register. There is a printed sheet, the only printed one in the set, reading PATRIARCHY PROTECTS PREDATORS NOT WOMXN AND CHILDREN, with a silhouette of a woman and child beneath it and an engraving of a raised hand above. There is a flat refusal of the whole political offer: NO COUNTRY FOR WOMEN, and under it a scoreline, ✗ MODI – 0, ✗ GANDHI – 0, ✓ FEMINISM – 1 , which declines to be a vote for anybody.
And there is a joke, which is how a lot of Indian placards do their politics. DAARU NE KUCH GHAR BARBAAD KIYE, PAR CHAI NE TOH PURA DESH BARBAAD KAR DIYA. Drink ruined a few households; tea ruined the entire country. The first half is a line of temperance-pamphlet moralism that any reader will have heard; the second half needs no explaining to anyone who knows which Prime Minister is said to have sold tea at a railway station.
Two more, quickly, because they belong to the same evening. NOT ALL MEN! BUT EVERY WOMAN I KNOW HAS A STORY , which concedes the interruption in order to make it useless. And, in pink marker surrounded by drawn flowers, May our children never know a society without consent.
That last one is the only placard in the set written about the future, and it is phrased as a blessing rather than a demand, which is a strange and quite old way to make a political point: not we want, but may it be so.
Set the ten together and the shape of the evening is clear enough. These are not people asking to be guarded. They are people saying what the body is for, and objecting, with some specificity and considerable rudeness, to everyone who has made that question difficult to ask out loud.